Calling a Lifeline

I don't know everything.

Heck, there are times the world is moving so fast it feels like I barely know anything relevant to this new-ish century.

So I have my "gurus" I call, everything from HR to social media to IT. Many of these folks offer me their expertise on a voluntary basis - their way of contributing to a better world.

I started thinking more about this when I realized that I, myself, serve as a life-line to several nonprofit leaders, on fundraising and board relations.

It's the "I think I know what to do but maybe my thinking is a little skewed so I'll run it by Cause Effective" school of thought.

And, surprise (!) our clients' thinking is often a little skewed - they're too down in the trenches to have the right perspective. "My board member wants to weigh in on the invites for the house party, but she's not even the host and it's really slowing down the process" went one lament.

The lifeline's answer? "Be glad she's interested enough to take the time - it's a hop skip and jump from there to making sure the invitations go to some of her pals, too."

Another recent query? "Do I really need to mail-merge all my appeal letters if I hand-write on them?"

Lifeline answer? "Depends on how much money you want out of the folks you’re writing to. If it's enough that it reflects a real personal commitment to your agency, you'd better honor that sentiment with personalization choices all the way down the line."

Don’t we all have that with someone? From asking advice on how a dress fits, or a tie is knotted, to how the t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted on fundraising-related matter.

The outside eye, the lifeline…

Development = Sales?

“You wouldn’t try to sell a product without an adequate sales team, would you?”

That’s the analogy a board member put out, as he tried to convince his organization to hire an additional development staffer.

It was an interesting thought – that posited the development department as the organization’s advance team, and the group’s real-world impact as an item to be sold to people just waiting to buy something they hadn’t known they needed.

Well, sure. Sorta.

And yet – it made me uneasy.

Not the aspect that posited that it takes staff to position and support an organization’s fund-seeking visibility/viability.

But the part that implied that staff itself were the “sales team” masterminding a pitch to an unsuspecting public.

Maybe I’m naïve in thinking of fundraising as a higher calling, but I see it as partnering with people of good will to help the world rise to a better place. There’s an element of sales, sure, because that’s the tools you need to get the job done. But at the core is a fierce dedication to mission, by all means necessary. At the core, it’s not about finding people who need/will purchase your wares – it’s about saving the world and bringing us all along with you.

But in any case, your development department is not your sales team. Your board is. The development department supplies the tools, but the board – and committee members, volunteers, other donors – are the ones doing the listening that allows the organization to close the sale.

OK, I said it. I guess there is more than a little element of sales here. But it’s a means, not the end.

Focused on Meaning

“Focus us on the big picture” one of my fellow board members requested of the executive director. “I love your updates and I really feel like I know what’s going on – but what does it mean?”

It’s that step from the accumulation of information to the creation of meaning…what gives order to a set of random (or not so random) facts, so that we can use them to predict future conditions or behavior.

Are summer camp pre-enrollment fees up or down? That’s one set of information. Does the reason behind the rise mean that they will continue to go up or was it a blip due to non-recurrent circumstances? And if the circumstances could be recreated and even maximized further, is the organization planning to put more effort into generating that revenue? And if so what will that do to staffing, and to mission – will it detract from mission to be running more of a “business venture” or will it add to the organization’s ability provide more mission-based activities to those who can’t afford those fees?

You can see that the set of questions generated from a simple fact – registration income up or down – can lead an organization in many different directions. I believe it’s the executive director’s charge to help the board to contemplate those larger questions – and that it’s the board’s job to serve as thought partners to push the executive director, in fact, to ponder those larger questions.

That’s the board at its highest and best use.

And that’s the kind of board conversations, by the way, that keep attendance at board meetings high, and the board jazzed up, paradoxically, to do the “mundane” work of fundraising.

So often these days we see boards who want to be engaged, who understand their organizations are in perilous times – and who are relegated to “Show me the money” directives by the staff. But without ownership, without a sense of “agency” – fundraising is a mandate unconnected to real impact on the world.

As a board member, as a staff member interacting with board, as a consultant brought in to “fix” the board – it’s our job to craft that real job of the board, that of pondering the big questions…by how we shape and context the information we provide them.

The primary question is not: What?

It’s: So What?

The Moocher

I was reading a parenting column the other day about the “Mooching Parent.” The person who’s always sending her kid home with yours on a playdate – at the last minute. The one who never hosts a sleepover. The one who texts asking you to pick up their younger child as well as your child’s best friend.

The one who’s using every lifeline they’re offered, and more.

I started thinking about that in light of a conversation I had earlier this week with someone about my board.

I was asking this person to find me someone with expertise in finance, and explained that I had one board member I leaned on heavily in communications, another who had expertise in strategic planning, another in HR, etc. How, really, I had a board of thought partners, each with their own area of expertise.

And that, together, we powered this nonprofit into much greater impact, in the manner of a nonprofit with a much larger staff.

We do that with volunteers, too – rope them in to help add to our professionalism in all sorts of realms, from social media to office systems to financial analysis.

It takes a village, to haul out a very tired phrase.

But for nonprofits, so true. Not mooching –corralling.

For the public good.

Selling Shoes

I’ve been thinking lately about the part of running a nonprofit that’s like running a business.

Well, actually, that is running a business.

With receivables, and getting the best price, and employee loyalty, and new lines of business – all that great stuff we thought we were getting away from when we went into social change instead of selling shoes.

I used to wonder, when I was a kid, how my cousins could go into selling shoes. Weren’t they concerned about making an impact on the world, doing something for people, I thought at the tender age of 10 and 12 and 14 (not knowing the term “social good”)?

And then at some point someone took me aside and took my self-righteousness down a notch by explaining that people needed something to put on their feet, and so even people who sell shoes are giving something back to the world.

Got it.

But there’s something very pure – tricky, but pure – about selling a product to people who pay if they like it. You hit the market right, you make money. Of course there’s advertising and capitalization and all that jazz, but how refreshing to have your popularity reflected by sales resulting in income!

(As opposed to the nonprofit economy where the product may be highly lauded by those it’s intended for – but they’re not the deep pockets that pay for the service. Welcome to two, even three or more, masters.)

How do you navigate all those imperatives, those drives and needs and social pulls – not least of which is the relentless mandate to make payroll, every two weeks?

Well, obviously (duh) – fundraising…

Welcome to our world – suppliers of social good and providers of a roof over our heads.

Whose Idea?

The Duty of Loyalty – that’s an old one, engraved in law and “best practices” board manuals from fifty years back.

The way I’d always heard it explained to me, it requires that board members put the interests of the corporation – the nonprofit – above all others, including their own.

Or that of other boards they’re on.

Tricky, for folks on multiple boards, if the organizations’ spheres of activity intersect at all.

I saw this come down last week, when a board member who’d been a driving force in promoting an annual Chili-Tasting Festival posited the idea that the Festival should be spun off – and he should run it.

Well he was right, the Festival had become too big an idea for the nonprofit organization to house. When it was five home cooks facing off, that was one thing. Now it was 25 chefs from around the country and growing, and producing the Festival – though profitable – was draining the resources of the hunger advocacy organization, called EAT (Everyone Advocates Together).

So here’s the dilemma. The board member proposed to run the Festival as a separate organization, and use the proceeds – the surplus – as a donation to EAT. Sounds good, right?

But there’s a few complicating factors. For one, EAT was about to see its brand equity, the sweat it had put in, the loyalty of the event volunteers, the interest of the event’s sponsors…evaporate without a value given to that. Without having EAT’s name on it, all of this intellectual property and relationships were being transferred over to the Festival without a second glance. (Here’s where a loud buzzer should sound – WRONG!)

But it was the board member’s idea and it wouldn’t have happened – or grown the way it did – without him! was the thinking.

Well, sure, but the board member had worked on the Festival as part of EAT. So his labor…and thinking…and the contacts he’d made…were under the umbrella of EAT, and remained the “property” of EAT.

This concept is clear and wide-spread when it comes to employees – what you create as part of your job becomes the property of the organization you’re working for unless agreed otherwise – but it applies to board members as well.

Let alone that if EAT were to spin this off, and the new group hired someone to run it, would this board member have been the best person for the job if there was an open job search? Maybe yes, or maybe no…

SO… the duty of loyalty. The obligation to ensure that the interests of the nonprofit corporation come first. You can see how this gets kind of messy!


PS The answer was, to have EAT co-sponsor the Festival with the new entity – and the board member stepped off the EAT board to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest (one of the other guiding tenets of board service).

Making It Fun

Cause Effective hosted our “It’s A New Year” party last week. A few years ago my board members protested too loudly when we were setting the date for a December holiday get-together, and asked if we could push the annual gathering till January. I complied, and we’ve never looked back.

So here we all were at the lovely Pescatore Restaurant, on the Upper East Side. We invite staff, former staff, board, former board, spouses, and a few long-time organizational “friends” – about 25 were planning to come, when all was said and done. We create nametags, but really, it’s a gang of insiders, most of whom have known each other for years.

The food was delicious, the wine kept flowing, but I was struck, most of all, by the squeals of delight every time someone new walked into the room. The people at this party – board members, mostly – were really glad to see each other, and to see the staff. Spouses got to catch up with each other’s doings, people shared news about kids and jobs and the state of the world – it was a chance to let down our professional divisions and share our commonality as humans.

Three days later, I think we’re all still carrying the glow.

We spend every day doing good in the world, or trying, at least. The warmth in this room was testament to the fact that the human connection, the pleasure in each other’s company, is as important a factor in where we put our energy, in how we choose to do good, as any rationale based on political values about the world.

Congeniality, collegiality, cordiality – not just the “c” list in a thesaurus…

They’re the hidden gems, the glue that makes slogging through the hard times of nonprofit governance/management (and lord knows there’s been a lot of them these past few years!) worthwhile.

Will I Be Noticed?

Remembering back to my college days, I was thinking about one semester when I made the mistake of signing up for an art history class at 8 am. Dark room, big lecture hall, slides, early morning…you get the picture. I just couldn’t stay awake.

I’m sure I was not alone.

And I’m equally sure that no one noticed.

At the last possible moment I had a fit of conscience and dropped the class. Nowadays I might have kept going and learned the material from the Web.

But the question at hand is: who paid attention? Who knew I was there in body but (truly) not in mind?

I’ve come across a few boards lately with that anonymity issue – or perceived anonymity. One board is pretty large, and another is actually quite small – but I can sense in all of them a feeling, on board members’ parts, that nobody will really notice if they’re not coming up to the plate.

So they come to meetings late because they don’t feel essential to the first half (or any) of the meeting. They don’t respond to group emails because they’re just one of the names on the distribution list. They don’t read the materials and they don’t ask the questions, because they know you (or someone, at any rate), has it in hand.

Anything familiar about this?

We’ve all been in situations where we’re happy to have someone else carry the ball. It’s rational – who wouldn’t be?

So what makes people step up to the plate?

In a nutshell – the attention (and praise) of their peers.

Does that happen on autopilot?

No.

It needs to be built, brick-by-brick. In day-by-day groundwork that gets volunteers, especially, to know in their gut that they’re a critical link in the chain.

That if they don’t show up, with full presence, that they’re breaking that promise.

That they’re letting other people down.

And that by their actions – or lack thereof – your clients, your organization, your mission, will lose.

Strategizing…Stargazing

Serendipity.

Sometimes that’s all it takes – a misguided spell-correct – to put a different angle on the task at hand.

In the frenzy of post-holiday emails, I dashed off a note asking someone for help strategizing on an upcoming grant deadline.

Well I guess strategizing isn’t a proper English word, though I certainly use it a lot. So in the infinite wisdom of the spell-checking gods, it was changed, I was going too fast, and there it was.

Need some stargazing with you…

Who wouldn’t respond positively to that invitation?

But beyond the chuckle, it brought me to reflection.

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with our strategizing – we’re too busy plotting a route between the trees.

Maybe what’s really needed is stargazing – lifting up our sights to imagine what’s not right in front of our eyes.

Maybe that’s what’s meant by leadership, what was so paradigm-busting about Steve Jobs (never mind his parsimoniousness in denying employees matching gifts).

The best ideas don’t come from the trees…we all know that.

But do we need to go on a 10-day vision quest to absorb the stars?

I feel a New Year’s resolution coming on (so what if it’s two days late).

More stars.

The forest day-by-day, for sure, but a little more time for the sky.

Shoulder To Shoulder

A couple of times a year, I come across the notion that a board of directors is an antiquated fossilized structure designed to mimic a top-down hierarchical corporate culture. Or something like that.

Yet to my way of thinking, the opposite can also be true.

With the right kind of energy spent on their care, boards can be the means to keeping our organizations porous – responsive of and to our publics, constituents, fans/critics, stakeholders. Boards are what keep us beholden to and drawing from our communities – they take us out of our silos and put us in the mix.

Sometimes I have the image of the board and staff standing in a circle holding hands – the organization within and the world without. And the hand-holders constantly shifting perspective from facing in…to facing out…to facing in…to facing out…

So why isn’t board service more like this poetic image?

Let me start by acknowledging how stressful life is. We simply don’t have enough time, those of us who’re trying to manage jobs, families, and volunteer save-the-world interests – to do everything well.

And so we triage. But not with equanimity – with guilt.

And board service is one of the places we can shrink back, thinking “the executive director can/will handle that.” But we know, in our heart of hearts, that that isn’t right. So we snap at someone, or don’t answer emails, or fight over turf, or in some other way let our frustration leak out that we can’t step up to the plate in a way we know we ought to.

Taking the weight off Atlas’ shoulders – and carrying it together.

It’s a radical, collectivist notion, this idea that boards are what position us as shoulder-to-shoulder – and keep us honest.

Try it on for size.

A Moment of Thanks

Thank you…


    Thanks so much…


          For your continued support…


                For your help which enables us to make an impact…


                        For everything you do and continue to do for us…


                               Thanks for “paying it forward…”


                                        How can I count the ways?


A little woozy, just came off writing 100 personal notes on our annual appeal letters.

And it’s almost Thanksgiving, to boot!

But it is a moment for acknowledging what a village we are…as in, it takes a village to create social change.

Scrolling through our list, I see vendors, consultants, clients. Former staff and former board members. Personal friends and, yes, relatives. Fans and colleagues and advisors. And that’s just my list – each of our board and staff members have their own similar lists.

The request? To enable Cause Effective to be there for the nonprofits who need us. It certainly makes it easier to ask for help for others – rather than simply for ourselves.

But isn’t that what we all do – ask for help for our beneficiaries, our clients, our communities?

And so I wear out my hand muscles penning thanks – on behalf of everyone working for community-based change, to everyone who might be part of this family, this village toiling together.

Ownership begats responsibility.

Act as if.

And give thanks – for the gift, for the intention, for the communality.

The Paper Bag Appeal

It's Appeal Time!

All over town, nay all over the country, people are folding and stuffing - and exhorting their board members to write inspiring, heartfelt notes at the top.

What an engine this is... well-oiled and rolling.

And Yet.

I was at a meeting last week where a development director remarked "I could send out an appeal on a paper bag and as long as I got it out early, it would be effective."

Well, kinda sorta.

It does matter that there's white space, and a catchy opening, and that the organization's impact is personified. And that there's a note so the letter is from a person to a person.

But, yes, it could be a note from my board chair on a paper bag, and if she sent it to someone who mattered to her, the equation stops right there.

Should that discourage those wordsmiths among us from carefully crafting a compelling case? No, because that inspires the asker - those note writers - as much as it does the recipient.

But it does mean that inspiring the asker, all year long, needs to be as much of a focus as gathering the names and addresses come mid-November.

The Canary In The Coal Mine

Last week we were sitting with a group of board members, would-be board members, and nonprofit staff…whose boards don’t work.

(Could that be any nonprofit? Nah… But I digress.)

We were talking about what happens when an individual joins a board and is enthusiastic, responsive, ready to roll up their sleeves – and then finds there’s “something rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Or not rotten, perhaps, just flaccid.

Sometimes that new member’s energy and vitality points up something you knew but were pushing to the back of your mind – that there’s something wrong here, and that that something has to get fixed.

But without being invited on with that specific request – to be a change agent – the new board member sits there bursting with energy…puzzled.

“Where’s everyone else at this table?” she wonders. “How come they look as pale as ghosts?”

And the moral is – it’s better to be honest. To explain to a board candidate that you are embarking on a board transformation, that they’re one of the first steps in that process (subtext: and that’s why they’re so important to the organization!); and that they have to be patient, purposeful, and determined – to create a new board climate.

Otherwise you end up with a canary in a coal mine – someone who points out how toxic the air is, and who ends up dead in their cage from breathing the atmosphere without protection.

Not to be melodramatic, or anything…

Of Gentrification and Fundraising

We were sitting with a grassroots board last week that’s doing a yeoman’s job of addressing the ever-creeping specter of gentrification in their neighborhood. Hardly a neighborhood in New York where that’s not the case…

This group had actually done an excellent job of defining its values and welcoming those newcomers who shared its ideals into the fold. In fact, several had taken seats on the board and were eager to start a fundraising committee to raise unrestricted funds from their contacts. What’s not to like about that?

And yet…

There was a neon red flag, to mix metaphors, going on here.

First off, to relegate fundraising to the “new folks on the block” was to mimic the larger society’s denigration of the neighborhood as lacking in value. By setting up two classes – the old and the new – and assuming one had the capacity to raise funds and the other was too poor and too lacking to do so…well you can see why we saw that as a set-up for trouble.

Secondly, that fed into a growing segregation on the board, also of the old and the new, where the new delivered and the old talked. Yipes!

Third, by assigning the fundraising duties to the “gentrifiers,” the board was implicitly linking fundraising with “dirty money” – again, shedding the idea that everyone is responsible for the organization’s financial survival.

And finally, and most importantly, this entire organization was founded under the predicate that diversity – economic diversity, ethnic diversity, professional and class diversity – is what makes the neighborhood a wonderful New York pot of stew. Why couldn’t it fashion a board that acted that way as well?

And the fact is, it could.

The board asked two long-time members, fearless organizers from the old days, to serve on the fundraising committee, and appointed one as a co-chair. They brought in Cause Effective to do some board training and work with the fundraising committee to draft a multi-faceted board fundraising plan – this ensured that the whole board spoke the same language around fundraising and that no one was more privileged by their prior experience with fundraising.

Finally, the board devised a set of metrics for success that included factors such as number of new donors brought into the fold, range of donor backgrounds, and variety of solicitation strategies – so the prize didn’t simply go to the one whose asks raised the most immediate cash.

We learned an important lesson with this group, about gentrification and values and fundraising. And that is, that while fundraising can be associated with gentrification and all things bad – hey it’s about the power of money to make things happen, isn’t it? – that fundraising can actually be a tool, a magnifying glass, to integrate the best of the old and new.

And that fundraising can, indeed, be about values, when practiced in a mindful way.

Shifting Your Seat At The Table

I was sitting around the table with a couple of board members a few days ago. We were chatting about leadership issues from my viewpoint as an executive director – in fact, from my stance as a consultant who deals with executive directors and board members – but at a certain point I realized I’d begun weighing in from my perspective as a board member, in fact as a board chair.

The subject? The age-old “How to get board members to govern from an oversight perspective instead of getting stuck in giving their opinions on the day-to-day?”

Oh, that one.

What was interesting was not the fact that we were having that conversation – who isn’t? – but that we could each speak from our experience as board members and as staff (albeit for different nonprofits).

Each of us knowing what it was like to be a chief staff officer trying to partner with board members, to get them involved in some activities but keep them at bay in others…and knowing at the same time what it was like as a board officer to be working with an executive director whose boundaries were either too porous (asking board members to volunteer at the front desk) or a pure stone wall (distributing financials a half-hour into a board meeting, giving board members no chance for meaningful review).

It really helped to have that dual perspective – it gave me some humility, having struggled on both sides.

My conclusion? That it’s the role, even more than the particular person, that creates the tension. Sure, some people will be obstreperous no matter where they sit, but there are constraints and imperatives from each station that are germane to that outlook.

And that I’d do well to remember this whenever I start to get too pompous about what one ought to do…

California Musing…

I’ve just come back from spending three days in California talking about how nonprofits all over the country are faring, these days.

The forum was the national Alliance for Nonprofit Management conference. Together with folks from Minnesota. Mew Mexico, Maryland, Ohio, California, New York and everywhere in between, over 100 nonprofit “capacity-builders’ made the space to think deeply about how nonprofits, and the people who run them, are coping.

I’ll warn you, this is not a column that offers solutions.

Some of the profound conversation-stoppers I heard:

As nonprofits hunker down and the more economically marginalized groups go back into their bedrooms, the nonprofit world is starting to become cleaved between two kinds of groups – small, unstaffed organizations, and larger, fully professionalized institutions. Are they really one sector?

In this time of profound change, do boards see their role as protecting the mission...or are they more vested in protecting their organization’s brand than in embracing change? Are boards ready to look at the fundamental business model of their nonprofit?

What is the net result of the deprofessionalization that goes on as a development director, or a chief financial officer, leaves – by attrition or through layoffs – and their role gets absorbed by the executive director? Leaving that piece of work to be done by someone without as much expertise and with multiple other competing priorities?

Are people tuning out from the advice deluge on coping strategies?

As hard as it was to live like Sisyphus, rolling the boulder up the hill, the burden now feels like we’re trying to carry a load of mud up the hill, which oozes out at every turn.

Sober musings, all…

Time to Contemplate

I was at a meeting today where board members were being asked to digest a long, complex planning document they’d first seen less than 12 hours ago, if at all.

It had some great ideas.

But it was just too much to absorb “live.”

Now would these board members have pored over the document ahead of time if it’d been sent a week in advance? Maybe, or maybe not.

But by bringing it to the meeting, the executive director all but guaranteed she’d have a “paper board” – a board whose function was to appreciate, not to contemplate.

I don’t think that’s what she intended to accomplish – after all, she went to the trouble of preparing a lengthy exegesis of current trends in the field and their relevance to the agency’s work. If she really wanted a noninvolved board, she could have simply prepared a board packet with financials, press releases and a program update, and called it a day.

So that got me thinking about the power of meetings to force preparation. You know you’re going to face people (especially the board), so you take the time to prepare a thoughtful framing of the issues you want far-sighted deliberation on. Well so far, so good…but the problem was, this executive director should have set a deadline not for the meeting date, but for (a minimum of) a week ahead.

Time to act thoughtfully – not a luxury in these tricky days. A lot depends on our ability to steer our agencies through tea leaves that are murky, at best.

Oxymoron: Relaxing In The Office

In the final days of summer, I’ve been trying on a new discipline – relaxing without being officially on vacation. 

Quite a concept, in the fundraising arena where stress is a constant companion.

So I started thinking about one of the 80/20 rules – the one that posits: schedule no more than 80% of your time because 20% will be added just through day-to-day interactions.

Maybe we should even make that a 65/35 rule of thumb.  But in the nonprofit world right now, where every division is understaffed and we’re all carrying a 150% workload, that’s pretty hard to do.

Sometimes the answer is compartmentalizing.  Training ourselves to see just what’s ahead and what’s doable – not the whole plethora of deadlines, opportunities, and holes in the dike that remain unaddressed.   Trying to focus on a 48-hour span, not on the panorama.  Not as breathtaking – but possibly a little bit more humane.

But that’s easier prescribed than lived.

I tend to see the whole mountain – in fact, that’s one of the key components of the job of development director (and executive director): to see how all the pieces fit together, to sequence and re-sequence the parts as easily as breathing, to always remain aware of the uphill climb and a host of various paths to getting there.

But there’s a serious downside to this wholistic mindset – we’re always aware of what’s next to be done, and that leaves us perpetually feeling as if we’ve got a week’s worth of important tasks to be completed in the next 36 hours.  No wonder the burden never goes away.

Breathing.  Vastly overrated, but there is something to taking a deep breath.  Or taking a walk, reading a poem, emptying one’s mind of the concerns at hand.  Years ago I worked a block away from a terrific gym – I used to go swimming at lunchtime.  My afternoon clients were better off from following my half-hour in the water, into which no voices could penetrate…

We need to create that psychic space, pool or no pool – our work will benefit, our ability to focus will improve, and our souls will be just a little bit lighter.

A better world starts at home…or at the office?

The Danger of Dowagers

We met with a group last week that, by rights, ought to have a robust donor base. Over 100 years old, founded by and affiliated for most of its first century with several of New York’s most august and philanthropic families.

Rescued by a bequest by one of those families last year, from near-death due to mounting debt.

There are many factors that brought this group to its knees like that, but one, frankly, was the curse of the benevolent “fixer.” I’m referring to the long-time (multi-generation, often) donor affiliation which has lost its luster – so that the family members still affiliated are giving out of duty, but are not motivated enough to be asking. The nonprofit was really important to someone a couple of generations back, but not to the folks on the board, now.

So why does this leave a group worse off than groups without this affiliation?

First, because, more often than not, the affiliation with this founding family has enabled the nonprofit to rest on that affiliation – to let its fundraising muscles go flabby. Janet will write a check, goes the history…so why do the hard work of finding and stewarding new donors, when Janet and her descendants will fill the void?

And second, because the group has people filling seats on its board who aren’t fulfilling the board’s primary role – to serve as ambassadors. Other board members get the message that what’s valued isn’t activation but check-writing; and while they may not be able to write that level of check, they’ll give up on the activation too, because it’s not the driving paradigm.

And finally, because having that level of resources on a board, puts stars in people’s eyes. The $500 donors don’t seem worth going after, because you’ve got $50,000 donors within reach.

But do you really?

You may have one at hand, who’ll eventually give you a bequest…but more than that is a mirage.

And mirages don’t cut it, these days...

Tell Me The Worst

This is a companion to last week’s piece, about the importance of trust in board-staff relations to fundraising success – and it’s about laying your cards down on the table.

Board members don’t like surprises. That’s a truism, but as a board member, staff leader and consultant to board members and staff leaders, I understand why it matters. The reasoning is akin to how, as a mother of teenagers, I find myself begging them: “Tell me the worst, whatever it is – but just don’t lie to me.”

What you know, can be dealt with.

What you don’t know, sneaks up and ambushes you.

We’re often called in, these days, on emergency fundraising campaigns. Those “If we don’t raise $100,000 by November we’re out of business” kind of appeals.

When you make that kind of last-ditch plea, people who care about your organization’s work may indeed come forward…but they’ll lose faith fast if it turns out you need that amount and then “Oh, I forgot, I also need $3,200 for the water bill” and “Our insurance is going to get cancelled if I don’t pay the overdue invoice” and “The IRS really does mean it this time, I guess.”

Tell me the worst – and let me, as a board member, be your partner in figuring it out.

Don’t cushion the bad news by parceling it out in drips and drabs.

You may think you’re protecting me by holding the worst back. But it’s going to come out anyway, and nobody…but nobody…likes Chinese water torture.